Santorum steps into new debate role

There will be four men and one moderator on stage at Wednesday night’s GOP debate in Arizona. But Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum will be the main attractions.

The CNN-sponsored debate in Mesa — the first one in almost a month — looms as a focal point in a contest that has increasingly been recast as a two-man fight, with polls showing tight upcoming contests between Romney and Santorum in Arizona and Michigan.

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The setting in many ways favors Santorum, who has tended to get the better of Mitt Romney in their exchanges in past debates. The X factor is Newt Gingrich, who may be tempted to ditch an easy chance to let others throw punches and instead try to claim the spotlight in a format that — at least until Florida — had proved successful for him throughout the GOP primary.

Santorum, while less theatrical than Gingrich, is the most agile debater in the current field. But Romney is also strong and has tended to perform at his best when he’s had to come from behind — witness the two Florida debates before the Jan. 31 primary. In those venues, when he needed a command performance, he delivered.

Their lines of attack are clear: Santorum is certain to hit Romney over the Massachusetts health care plan that was his signature achievement as governor. Romney will fire back that Santorum is an “insider,” the same line he has used to try to dispatch other rivals, and will point to the former senator’s earmarks and other issues that undermine Santorum’s claims of fiscal conservatism.

For Santorum, the debate will mark his first appearance on the hot seat as he heads into Wednesday evening as the de facto front-runner — and the man under attack from Romney and Ron Paul.

The difference between Santorum and the other contenders whom Romney has faced so far? Of all of them, Santorum has proved how hard he can hit back on stage and drive to keep punching.

“We believe Romney’s very good at what we would call ‘hit and run,’” Santorum adviser John Brabender told POLITICO, adding that he “has a surrogate throw out half a story on Rick Santorum” and then tries to lob shots from a safe distance.

“There’s no way to hide in a debate where there’s only four people standing on stage,” Brabender said, adding that the campaign doesn’t spend much time preparing for these events.

“Rick Santorum won’t be the least bit afraid of Barack Obama either,” Brabender said. “You’re not going to just back down when someone disagrees with you. It’s the difference between a forum and a debate. [‘Romneycare’ is] a discussion that is so fundamentally critical to this race, because how do you take Obamacare off the table [in a general election]?”

Romney, Brabender added, tends to stick with a set of “Pavlovian” responses.